I should be very pleased for now ex-PC Gamer writer and fine fellow Tom Francis, whose lovely debut Gunpoint, made in his spare time over the last three years, has proven wildly successful enough for him to “quit jobs, as a concept” and grant him total creative freedom for whatever he wants to do next and for the foreseeable future. Instead, I feel physically ill with envy and crippled by self-loathing at my own failure to work on a game as yet, all compounded by worry that feeling that way is a sign that I am a bad person. I am attempting to purge all these unpleasant emotions by posting about Tom’s amazing news.
He’s fairly open (and witty) about what happened in a long post-release write-up here. “There’s really no pressure for my next thing to make a particular amount of money, so I can do whatever I think will be most exciting,” he claims, and the good news for all of us is that he’s now even more determined to keep on treating his players/customers right.

For instance, despite encountering of a lot of industry ‘wisdom’ which claimed putting out a demo before the full game was available means lost sales, from his point of view it meant people could check the game worked on their PC before committing and he didn’t depend on making eager fans pay blindly. Other nice things he’s done include happily providing refunds to anyone who’s had problems running the game.

In other words: despise and envy Tom Francis for his vast riches and total freedom from the system, but love him for being the sort of game developer we wish all game developers could be. Congratulations, sir.

Meantime, Gupoint is now up to its third patch, there’s plans for more updates later, and Tom’s looking for a spot of dev help to iron out the last few issues and come up with Mac and Linux versions.

Right, do I feel any better for writing this? Um. I’m going to go and see if there’s anything I want in the discounted damaged goods in Tesco, put it that way.

It’s because for a modern AAA game, a demo can only lose you sales. After all, everyone knows how an FPS works, or a cover-based third person shooter, or a racing game or sports game. There’s no point in trying it out, you know almost exactly what you’re going to get; and if it turns out that the gameplay is a bit wonky, well, then you might not buy it.

For something like Gunpoint though, a demo will increase sales – comparatively few people have it on their “buy this regardless” list, so if they play the demo and like it they’re a lot more likely to buy.

I was already fairly sure I wanted it but wasn’t sure which tier, but the demo convinced me to get the higher one because A) it’s fun and B) the dialogue is really well written and genuinely funny, especially the unique bit that concludes the demo.

Plenty of AAA titles get to their high sales numbers through hype. That doesn’t mean that those titles are bad but no game can ever live up to its hype because in the end, promises are always cheaper than game development hours.

Dear Alec: Why not ask Tom if you can work on his next game? Because you know it’s gonna be great.

Dear Tom: Thank you for making Gunpoint. It was great, and it reminded me that I wanted to write a comedy noir novel, which I plan to start as soon as I’ve finished this commmmmmmmmmmm…ennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn…ttt……that I am….. typing…..now….

Genuinely pleased that it’s become a success. Regarding his point about demos or lack of them, this game was something I was quite looking forward to, but playing the demo immediately made me pre-order it. I’ve no doubt that if there hadn’t been a demo, I’d have waited until a half-price sale before buying.

This would be a reverse kickstarter. The object is to stretch Alec’s suffering/misery/dejection over as many days as possible, the limit being not going over a certain amount donated to make Alec feel some semblance of self-worth.

Releasing demos might hurt sales an appreciable amount for AAA studios that are backed by investors. This guy, who had no investors but himself, released a very nice demo, through which I bought the final product. He didn’t lose my sale. In fact, if he hadn’t made a demo, I’d have never bought the game, despite my friends all telling me that the game was excellent. I’m glad I bought the game, and I’m glad he has a ton of money now. I hope he goes off and does something equally as fun and inventive as Gunpoint, if not better.

I’m proud to have supported Mr. Francis. He seems like a pretty cool dude.

It’s gauche in our world to talk numbers, because, you know, numbers tend to undermine impressions of success people like to put out and numbers relating to money put out in public make it much harder to cheat on your taxes etc.

But I’m sure none of the above applies to the good sir. Is there any indication how many copies sold it takes to hit that retirement threshold in this case?

Good for him! I played in a closed beta test and beat the entire game, a little “meh” feeling to see that the release game didn’t add any more content from the client I tested, but still glad to give him my moneys for the good work.

Hope to see more levels… I understand the replayability aspects of trying to do levels differently but that doesn’t appeal to me as much as new levels would.

Interesting points about demos. Puppygames recently and quite publicly decided against releasing demos for sales reasons, going so far as to retroactively disable their old demos. They have long struggled with profitability and deduced that in their case, it was the best thing to do. Letting someone try your product for free can go both ways, depending on the demo and the nature of the game. UT3 never recovered from its awful demo, for example, but Doom benefited mightily from its “shareware” release.

Releasing those multiple versions was a good idea. For me, I might have waited for a sale if I didn’t feel guilty for having played the entire game during beta. I upgraded to the commentary version just so I could feel like I was getting something out of it. Anyway, great game all the same!

* Game buying patterns have changed
* Games are so cheap now that buying without trying is common
* People who play the demo just talk themselves out of buying it somehow

My self-centered view is.

* I typically refuse to buy games at the 1 dollar pricepoint. Often I buy indie games multiple times to raise the price to what I think is reasonble
* I am very picky about my game design. If i think the game is player hostile (for example puppy games has controversial difficulty auto-adjusting) for some reason, I want to send a no-sale message to the maker, not a sale message.
* The decision to not make a sale further adjusts the relationship from seller / customer towards producer / consumer. This mirrors many other shifts in the world that I don’t appreciate.